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Effective management and  employment of this asset is even more critical in today’s business climate and highly competitive environment.

In a tough economic climate with unrelenting pressure on training budgets, companies, today, are increasingly demanding reduced time-to-production.

Further, training vendors are constantly challenged to demonstrate the value, ROI and business impact of training initiatives. For organisations, the challenge is to keep the skills of human capital updated within reasonable budgets. It is, thus, imperative that when a skill augmentation/update is required, a suitable training vendor is engaged that can deliver Complete Learning Experience (CLE™) while reducing Total Cost of Learning (TCL™).

Rapid changes
The rapid changes in technology landscape, coupled with vast array of technology options available to professionals, are making corporate training requirements increasingly complex and challenging to manage in-house for the Learning & Development Managers. These demands make corporate training a totally different ball game as compared to retail training delivery.

The scenario today is different, with an increase in awareness of corporate training in Indian industry, a gradual shift from general to specific approach has been realised.

This translates to moving to “tailored” in-house/customised training, as opposed to openhouse/ public training courses. With the high churn rates that IT companies in India are witnessing, training today is  considered as a retention tool than a cost, by most managers.

Despite the current challenging market, Gartner predicts, that the ongoing need for qualified IT personnel in Asia Pacific will fuel major opportunities for IT training and certification in the region and estimates that around 1.5 million IT experts will be needed by 2012.

Key drivers for this longer term growth include enhancements in collaborative tools and technologies, backed by increasing Internet penetration to deliver online content. Although majority of the employed IT professionals hold relevant “qualifications”, the industry still faces declining numbers of qualified (read: ready to deliver) and skilled manpower.

IT spending in India is projected to total $79.8 billion in 2012, a 9.1 per cent increase from 2011 spending of $73.1 billion, according to Gartner Inc. Despite the global economic challenges, enterprises will continue to invest in IT.

A corporate training delivery must be process oriented, understanding business drivers behind the training requirement, scoping the delivery content requirements, assigning subject matter expert/industry consultant as a trainer, pre-training assessment, preparing trainees, delivering business specific customised course, post-training assessment and followup/ assistance.

The process must be supplemented with training lifecycle management – planning, management, administration and advisory. This must relieve Learning & Development Managers from the rigour of organising and managing the trainings – they must be focusing on understanding the learning and development needs of the employees; not spending their time and effort in nuances of organising and facilitating a training.

Few training vendors offer LPO, and those who do immensely help their clients in addressing the challenges by taking complete ownership of end-to-end learning process right from the inception of the training requirement, thus ensuring a rich and complete learning experience and not just a classroom training.

Another important aspect of corporate training is to increase the value and return on training investment by designing a course that is clearly aligned with corporate strategy, in terms of program objectives, solution design and content.

By leveraging the business strategy as the framework for people development, corporate training companies can deliver powerful and precise training framework that is directly  aligned with key business goals, thus helping the professionals to connect points between training and actual requirements at work.

Given the hectic schedule and frequent travel of professionals, corporate training must be available in multiple modes like in-house, open-house, private, public, instructor-led, online, virtual, which can be consumed by the trainees on schedule as well as when possible.

Further, companies expect same level of professionalism from its training providers, that their customers expect of them. If training vendors want to develop a serious long term engagement with their customers, offering “Service Level Agreements” has to be an integral and a standard practice.

Spring Framework is one of the best examples of technology success on the back of a very strong community. Back in early 2000, there was no one to question J2EE as a standard, which was driven by Sun Microsystems – the creators of Java itself. Without incredible support from the Java development community, it would have been impossible for rebel framework like Spring to succeed – but, that’s what happened and now there are more than 10 million downloads (estimated by Gartner) and over 6 million active Spring users worldwide.

As we know, it is the Spring community that is behind the incredible success that the technology has enjoyed – there are numerous strong and active Spring User Groups in various countries. It is good to see that an active Spring user community developing in India. It’s also heartening to see SpringSource playing an active role in imparting the Spring Framework expertise through their official training courses to the massive Spring user community in India – by partnering with SpringPeople (http://www.springpeople.com), the master training and consulting partners for SpringSource. This has been a much awaited and welcome news for Java developers in India looking for quality training on Spring Framework and related technologies – the only two alternatives before this were either to undergo training from other grey market training providers, often are very poor in quality, or to go for official SpringSource University training outside India – a very expensive and inconvenient option.

SpringPeople recently published the full training schedule for 2011 (http://www.springpeople.com/courses/schedule.php) – and to the delight of many, it includes not just Core Spring, but also other eagerly awaited courses like Enterprise Integration with Spring, Rich Web Applications with Spring, Hibernate with Spring, Tomcat Administration and Groovy & Grails. Needless to say, the possibilities/options for Spring users in India to improve their skills and enhance their expertise of the technology have taken a massive leap – be it undergoing the official Spring training or interacting with the local, like minded software developers.

Popularity of the ubiquitous Spring Framework, the java development platform created and maintained by SpringSource Inc. has been growing at a terrific rate since it’s inception with Rod Johnson’s first book in 2002. Gartner estimates over 5 million developers are using Spring Framework in their day to day job (based on over 8 million software downloads of the Framework); Needless to say, the need of good quality Spring training is in huge demand. The simple answer one would expect is for such a training to come directly from the creators i.e. SpringSource itself – that’s where the challenge begins though!

SpringSource indeed has a strong services division, and provides training and certification services to people who are interested. The issue is of reach – with a finite number of consultants on board, it’s not possible for SpringSource to make training available to everyone and in all parts of the world. This becomes all the more tough when dealing with developing countries like India, where even a high-end, niche course like Spring Framework training will not get many buyers if global prices are used (often in thousands of dollars).

The solution is to expand via partners and that’s what they have done very well. For example, SpringPeople Technologies are certified training delivery partner for SpringSource in India – on an exclusive basis. The advantage this has is that SpringSource can ensure that the students coming to the training courses are getting the same high quality training that they can expect from the creators of the technology themselves, while at the same time, the course prices can be kept reasonable and other services like certification and consulting are available locally. As one can expect, such quality assurance is possible only with the rigorous certification criteria that SpringSource has before they certify a consultant for training delivery, coupled with an ongoing investment in partner development and courseware maintenance – all courseware is created and maintained by SpringSource consultants, who are also committers on the Spring Framework project. This is what differentiates quality from chaff – there are numerous training providers claiming to have a “good quality training” on the subject, but can anyone doubt the quality that comes from the training that has been developed by the creators of the technology itself? With the technology changing so fast, another huge advantage of getting an “official” training is the Spring Framework developers/committers keep the training material up to date on the latest advances in the technology – not something that many can achieve!

This strategy gives SpringSource a chance to focus on developing and promoting the technology itself – taking it to the next frontier; while SpringSource partners can continue to serve the Spring community satisfying the training, certification and services requirements of the individuals and companies. This is especially true for India where almost all the big software companies have an offshore development centre. SpringPeople Technologies has been doing a good job running Spring training in all the big Indian cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune etc and of course, taking the training in-house for companies that need such a service.

Welcome to SpringPeople blog!

Please feel free to share your thoughts/comments on SpringPeople offerings and activities. We value your feedback and will try to reply/act on the feedback from the community as soon as possible.

Regards
Peeush